Eric Yokomori / Eric Yokomori likes to mess with your mind.

As with Beckett, Ionesco and the late Harold Pinter, the 35-year-old Yokomori plays with ideas, challenges the audience and dissects his characters, often fatally. In the small world of local theater, Yokomori has chosen a career that will earn him practically nothing but an audience.

“As a playwright, it’s not about making a living, because, obviously, I’m not making a living doing this,” he says. “It’s about, are these ideas correct? Will they, at the end when I’m finished with the play, make some kind of sense?” He likens play-writing to gambling on a baseball game or a horse race.

“It’s about picking a winner and then watching the game and saying, ‘Yes, I picked the winner,’” Yokomori says, then smiles. “That’s kind of satisfactory.”

His plays, however, are far from feel-good fare. A twinned set of works are slated for production later this year by Kumu Kahua–the one-act House Lights and a montage of short scenes, Prolonged Sunlight.

Ribald, crude, salacious, perverse, provocative and downright funny, Yokomori’s work confronts the audience with images and dialogue most of us would keep in our heads–and yet, that is exactly the allure, according to director Harry Wong, III.

“What [Eric’s] good time is, is different than the good time you’re expecting,” Wong explains.

Yokomori’s plays are a departure, too, from Kumu Kahua’s usual works depicting local life. They represent a step toward more avante-garde theatre–a breech that began with Dennis Carroll’s 2005 drama Age, Sex, Location, and has widened since.

“My argument to the board,” Wong says, “is that this man is the best writer in Hawaii.”

Tony Pisculli, who directed Yokomori’s first play, Down, echoes that assessment.

“[Eric] just seems to tap into this thing where this twisted genius comes out of left field. That’s one aspect that is so exciting–the extremity of it,” says Pisculli. “It’s not linear, it’s not logical, and yet it makes sense.”

Pisculli met Yokomori when both were in Dennis Carroll’s playwriting class at the University of Hawaii, Manoa (UHM) and Down immediately caught Pisculli’s attention: “It was the first time I’ve ever seen a piece that came out of a class and thought, this has to be done, it has to be on stage … it was so compelling.”

There’s little in the cherub-faced Yokomori’s background that foreshadows works of scatological dialogue and deviant themes, unless one can view his artistic outpouring as a response to religious repression. He spent his early years in home-school. Sort of.

“We’d spend the majority of time praying and not really doing any sort of school work,” he says.

Later, he went to Pearl City High, but his parents pulled him out and sent him to a parochial school. Yokomori found student life there strange and oppressive. They had no actual teacher, he said, but students worked alone in cubicles. Lunches were purchased by putting money on top of the cubicle and an assistant would take the order. “It would be a selection of frozen entrees that they would heat for you in the microwave,” Yokomori smiles ruefully. “I graduated from that school.”

A short time at Honolulu Community College opened his eyes to another kind of life, and he credits HCC photography professor Bud Brooks with giving him needed encouragement. Yokomori then went to CalArts to study painting, returned to the Islands after running out of money, and began courses in English at UHM. That’s when the playwriting bug hit him, hard.

There were unforeseen complications, of course. When Down premiered at Paliku Theatre, the audience was filled with Yokomori’s relatives.

“There was some strong language in the play,” he recalls, “and my auntie was sitting in front of me and every time one of those words came out of an actor’s mouth, she would go, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’”

It hasn’t deterred him.

“I hope that as I’m writing that I never censor myself or omit something or add something in an attempt to win an audience,” Yokomori says. “I don’t know how to rewrite a play, really. It’s sort of like … I mean, if a woman gives birth to a child, she doesn’t stuff it back in her uterus and give birth to it again. You know what I mean? She doesn’t take that baby and say, ‘Wait a minute! There’s something wrong with this baby. I need to give birth to it a second time.’”

Director Wong wouldn’t want him to. “I’m not going to touch his work,” says Wong. “I’m going to put it up there and let it burn the audience.”

---